VC Firm a16z: ‘Ethereum Is a Far Superior Blockchain Now Than It Was Before’

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On September 15, the day that Ethereum completed its Merge upgrade, marking its transition from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus, Silicon Valley based venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (“a16z”), explained why “Ethereum is a far superior blockchain now than it was before.”

Around 7:00 a.m. UTC on September 15, Ethereum’s Merge upgrade was completed:

Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin called this successful upgrade “a big moment for the Ethereum ecosystem”:

Andreessen Horowitz, which was founded in 2009 in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, is a venture capital firm that “backs bold entrepreneurs building the future through technology.” It claims that it is stage agnostic, investing in “seed to venture to late-stage technology companies, across bio + healthcare, consumer, crypto, enterprise, fintech, games, and companies building toward American dynamism.” a16z has “$35B in assets under management across multiple funds.”

In a blog post published on Merge Day, Ali Yaha, a General Partner at a16z, called the Merge “an insane feat” since this upgrade “involved hot-swapping the most important component of Ethereum’s architecture – its consensus mechanism – *while it was running*.” Yaha noted that “all this occurred while maintaining perfect uptime for millions of users, thousands of decentralized applications (dapps), and hundreds of billions of dollars secured.”

Yaha then said that were some of the main advantges of Ethereum’s move to PoS consensus:

  • “Post-Merge, Ethereum is now 100x+ more energy-efficient than it was before. Participating in consensus no longer expends the enormous amount of electricity that PoW does. After The Merge, energy usage of ETH will be comparable to the datacenters of web2.“
  • “PoS has direct access to each validator’s “stake”, the funds, or skin-in-the-game, that validators deposit to secure the network. That allows PoS incentives to be far more granular, further increasing security.“
  • “… anyone with 32 ETH can now participate as a validator on Ethereum.“
  • “On a PoS blockchain, transactions that go through consensus are final… Transaction finality on Ethereum will lay the groundwork for future work that will improve Ethereum’s ability to scale (via “layer 2” solutions such as rollups), connect to other blockchains (via cross-chain bridges), and build better abstractions for developers that are easier to use and reason about.“

He also mentioned that the Merge is “a big deal” that “brings us closer to a world that benefits from an efficient and secure layer for decentralized computation that can support the applications we all want to build.”

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